Bittersweet
by Posy Penelope
Summary: What really happened the day of the bombings, and reflections on it years later.  Slight Gale/Katniss, Slight Gale/Madge. Because neither of these stories were finished, and maybe it's better that way.


**A/N: This is what I think should have happened on the day of the bombings. I can accept that Madge died and I'm not going to change it, but I think she had more to do than just sit in her house and die. Other than that it's completely canon, and I hope you enjoy it. Also, about pairings - I'm completely undecided. In fact I think I like best that nothing really ended perfectly, and hope I conveyed both Gale/Madge and Gale/Katniss in this. Enjoy :)**

**-Sophie x

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She's just leaving the bakery when the first bombs go off. There's pandemonium everywhere and she can't think of anything, nothing at all except self-preservation and the will to run as far as she can and never look back.

Of course. That's how it is for a town girl.

And then she sees two little Seam boys, one about eight and he's towing his little brother along. They're screaming that their house is on fire and their parents are inside and that somebody has to save them, and something inside her just snaps. These boys have done nothing all their lives except barely survive on what they have. They are too young to understand the antics of the Capitol; all they know is the rules of survival that children in the Seam have to learn so tragically young. They have done nothing wrong, and now they have been sentenced to die.

She rushes over to them, thrusts her newly bought bread into the hands of the older boy, tell him that she is going to go get their parents but they have to run, run as fast as they can to the other town because it's not safe here. He eyes her warily and then complies, because he is young and in this situation he has no other options but so, so much to lose. Madge wishes she could follow them and make sure they're okay, but she knows there are so many more in worse situations so she watches them go, and then she runs faster than she ever has before straight into the middle of the Seam.

It's the smell that gets to her first. Not the screaming, or the heat from the fire, but that sickening, all-consuming scent of burning wood and flesh. It makes her feel nauseous and claustrophobic and for a second, all the wants to do is run back to her old life with comfortable couches and grand pianos, but somehow this newfound determination wins out over all of that. She rushes over to little girl trapped between her house and a burning log that her small legs can't step over. She picks her up and runs to a hole in the district fence, where she can see people climbing through and escaping into he forest.

She runs straight into another house, where there is a little boy with his leg trapped under a section of fallen roof. It's so badly burned that for a second she has to turn away, but then she picks him up and tries to ignore his screams. She takes him to the hole and places him in the arms of one of the men helping carry through people who can't walk. She hopes somebody in the woods knows how to help him. She doesn't.

She sees a boy about twelve holding a baby perhaps a few months old, and there are two identical girls who look about 5 standing near them. She rushes over to them and asks the eldest why they aren't going into the forest, and he replies that they can't find their parents and they're not leaving without them.

Their parents.

Suddenly Madge remember that she hasn't even gone back to check if her parents are okay, and she's running back to the other side of town as fast as she ran from it, through the heat and the smell that makes her want to be sick. She's just a few streets from her own and everything is burned but she keeps going, praying that her parents are okay and that by some miracle her street has been the exception, that it's just the same as she remembers it this morning.

It's not.

If she closes her eyes, she can't feel anything. There's no fire here. Very little smoke. The gentle breeze is carrying heat from the other side of town, but other than that, there is nothing.

If she opens her eyes, she can see the ashes. The ashes that tell her the street is burnt, the pretty irises once grown here are burnt, and her house is burnt. The house in which her parents are now trapped forever.

Her father, who loved his wife and daughter more than anything in the world, always willing to give help to whoever needed it. Ready to sacrifice anything for the greater good, who worked from the inside to abolish the cruel regimes of the Capitol. Her mother, never the same after the Capitol took her sister, crippled by the illness she was unable to get treatment for. Loving in her own hard way, the one Madge learned to distinguish from coldness far, far too late.

She can't cry, not yet. In her mind there is nothing, nothing at all except a crushing numbness that that threatens to immobilise her and keep her here for as long as she can foresee, but there's no point to that.

There's also anger. Red hot, fiery, everything that Madge can put into emotion is right there at the front of her mind. Anger at the Capitol, anger at her parents, anger at herself, all of it is threatening to consume her. But Madge learned long ago that there is no point to anger if you don't do something with it, so she uses it to fuel her up and back to the Seam. The Capitol has already destroyed almost everything that meant something to her. They're not going to do it to anyone else.

She hears the cry of a child from a burning house and she rushes in. She's trying to ignore the burning in her feet and the thick smoke in her lungs, and she's nearly reached the child when she comes face-to-face with Gale Hawthorne. His face is covered in soot and his eyes are burning with his usual fiery determination that for the first time in her life, Madge knows is reflected in her own. Steely grey meets warm blue and they reach an unspoken understanding, as Gale develops a new respect for the town girl that up until now he has thought of with nothing but contempt.

Madge picks up the little girl as Gale scoops up an older, pregnant woman lying unconscious on the floor, and then they run out of the house as fast as they can.

The fires are rampant now, and there's nobody else in sight. Madge and Gale know that they cannot save any more people, so they run through the hole and into the woods, hoping that they haven't been too late for the woman.

They haven't. Gale sits on a rock some distance away as he watches Prim and Mrs. Everdeen revive the woman as Madge comforts the small child who is screaming for her mother. There's so many emotions running through him: sorrow, regret, devastation, and all of them manifest themselves into a fiery, burning rage directed at the Capitol. How can they do things like this? How can they not see how wrong it is? How can they look past all of their similarities and do such things to their fellow people, all in the name of power?

He could rant about it forever. He _wants_ to. He wishes Katniss were here. She would let him.

But one look towards Madge, and he wonders what good it would do. She is clearly as angry as he is; yet instead of sitting here seething, she is doing what she can to help others. Watching her soothe the child reveals a whole new side to her, and he adds it to the list of things he knows about her. Town girl. Mayor's daughter. Katniss's friend. Freedom fighter. Rebel.

Carer. As soon as he thinks it he knows that it is true. Everything about her emanates it at full force. So why then is he surprised that when the pregnant woman screams that she can't find her husband and they have to go find him _now_, Madge agrees with her?

The woman is due to have her baby any day now, and Gale won't let her go. He won't let anyone else either – it's just too dangerous. And then Madge walks up to him, and the full force of what he saw in her eyes earlier is now directed upon him.

"What if it were you?"

He knows it's true, and it gets to him. If it were his mother or his siblings or Katniss missing, he knows that he would already be out there, searching for them no matter what the cost.

Madge continues, "She is unable to look for him, but we're not. We can, and we will, but we have to go _now_."

She's not yelling, just speaking in a low, commanding voice, yet Gale has never felt more affected and he looks at his feet, embarrassed. This town girl, who he has always thought himself so superior to, has managed to shame him into something that he otherwise wouldn't have even considered. He's not sure it it's wanting to prove himself, to please Madge, to help the woman or some strange combination of the three, but either way he finds himself walking through the Seam with Madge, looking for people. And there's people, all right.

But there's no survivors.

The scattered bodies crumbling into dust in the wake of the now-gone fire make Madge start to tear up, and it isn't until Gale reaches out and squeezes her hand that she realises that he is, too. Madge tries to avert her eyes away from them, but there's so many, and it kills her. The scattered bodies are a constant reminder that, no matter how many people they save today, they are always going to be too late. They're walking hand-in-hand through the ruined Seam, quiet until Gale starts to talk.

"Thanks for making me come out here, Madge. If it had been someone _I_ cared about…" he trails off.

"I know how you feel about her, you know. About Katniss. It must be hard for you. She's everything you want and everything you know you'll never be able to have."

Gale sighs and purses his lips regretfully. "You know the feeling?'

Madge shrugs and one side of her mouth twists up into a wry smile. "Something like that," she replies, and Gale will never know how true these words are.

They're just about to deem it hopeless and return back to the woods, when they hear a faint cry coming from a burnt-out house, and it's at that moment that their two different worlds seem the furthest apart.

Both of them want nothing more than to save the person trapped inside. But Gale, he's been living in the Seam his whole life. His circumstances have made him used to illness and death and the fact that sometimes, you just can't save people. And he knows that he can't save this person, because he knows what is going to happen to this house in approximately thirty seconds.

Madge isn't like that. In her exclusive situation, she hasn't been able to get used to hardships when there has immediately been a cure for them. She hasn't developed a head for this kind of situation, because frankly she has never needed to. It was her heart that made her give her mother's morphling to Gale, her heart that caused her to rescue as many people as she could from the fires, and ultimately it's her heart that makes her run into the house to save the person trapped inside.

But it's also her heart causes her, before she does, to throw her arms around Gale's neck and kiss him. It's short, and it's desperate, but its all Madge has ever wanted so she doesn't even care. For a few brief seconds his hands are on her waist and he's kissing her back, until she pulls away and runs into the house before he realises what's going on.

He wants to call out and tell her to stay, but he can't make his lips form the words, so all he can do is watch as the roof of the little house collapses in and traps her there forever.

* * *

Gale wonders how it is possible to change opinions of somebody so fast. In the space of one day she went from snobby town girl to ally to friend to somebody that he has no idea how he feels about.

But there's no use thinking of that now, is there?

And so he wipes his eyes, lets go of the words he was going to use to make her stay, and then he touches his lips one more time before he forgets what Madge's felt like against them.

There are more important things to worry about now.

* * *

Sometimes he still thinks of her. Sometimes when he's sitting in is big new house, in between lovers and sick of moping about the loss of Katniss, he'll think of her. It's a whole jumble of bittersweet memories mixed into one: feelings of injustice as he sees her with everything he has to go without, selling her strawberries every Sunday, finding out it was her who gave him morphling and feeling nothing but confusion. Helping her save people from the fires and granting her some hard-earned respect, the taste of soot and tears on her lips as she kissed him for that one first and last time.

She doesn't cross his mind often, but when she does the memories are so tangible Gale feels he could just reach out and she would be there. He still remembers short, wavy blonde hair, warm blue eyes and the kind smile she was willing to give to anyone. The clear nailpolish and pretty dresses that made evident the things that stood between them, the things that despite everything didn't matter in the end. He can see a pretty pink dress with a burn mark on the front of it, a face stained with soot and hair slicked back with perspiration. Fiery determination in her eyes as she made evident the Madge that was there all along, but that he was too prejudiced to see until the very end.

He wonders what things were between them. When she said she knew the feeling of unrequited love, was she talking about him? What did that kiss mean? Was he the one she was talking about, or was it just desperation? What was it about her that made her able to leave such a lasting impression in just one day?

But Gale knows that he'll never be able to get answers to these questions, so eventually he just stops asking.

Gale lost a lot of people during the war. Some so great he felt he might never be able to go on, like the loss of Katniss. Others not so much, hurting not because he cared for them personally but because of the unfairness of their deaths, such as those of the members in squad 451. It's a bit strange, really, that the death of Madge hurts so much more than those such ones. He was closer to them, knew more about them. What makes hers hurt so much is that it was cut short, stopped right at the part where it should have started. There was something there but it will always remain unfinished, and he'll be left wondering about it forever and there's nothing he can do.

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Years later, he'll be back in District Twelve. He'll see everything for how it was and everything for how it could have been, but it won't hurt as much anymore. Pain fades over the years, and you learn to accept things that happened because deep down you know you couldn't have changed anything.

He will have made up with Katniss, just a few days ago. He won't have meant to, but they'll see each other in the square and he'll refer to her as Catnip, and they'll realise that despite everything some bonds just go to deep to break. They'll talk about their lives since the rebellion, and when it's time to say goodbye he'll give her a hug just like he used to, and they'll both get an ache in their chests as they realise just how close they were to what could have been.

He'll have a daughter by then, with a wife who left because she got sick of the fact that he'd never be able to give her everything. His daughter will be seven, eight the next week. She'll have his tanned skin and dark hair and her mother's green-blue eyes. She'll be demanding and intense, surprisingly so for someone so young, but she'll have a sweet side too and Gale will know that he'll never be able to love anybody more than he loves her.

He'll be nearly about to leave and go back to District Two before he'll realise he's forgotten something, and so on the last day of his visit he'll be walking slowly into a graveyard with a single rose as his only companion. He'll search long and hard for one particular grave, and a wave of nostalgia will grab him when he finds it.

There will be soft orange sun dappled onto it, a peaceful scene, and Gale will stand there and just look at it, still unsure after all these years about what to feel about the girl buried here. He will stand there with his eyes closed, hands in his pockets and breeze on his face, and he will think of everything he has tried to forget about for so long. Memories tinged with fire and desperation, blonde hair and blue eyes, soot and running and screaming. Squeezing hands and holding back tears, that one kiss and the helplessness he felt when she ran into the ramshackle house. He will think of everything he wishes he could change but that he knows he can't, and he will think of just how much he still misses her after all these years. The setting sun will be warming his face while the cool breeze sends shivers through him underneath his jacket, the setting matching the bittersweet memories he has of the girl he knew so little about.

"Madge Undersee," the gravestone will read, and he'll be angry for a moment when he sees there's no accompanying message, nothing that states the good things she did before she died. Thousands of people died that day, and no special burials have been granted to any of them. Her grave is respectful and yet impersonal, and it makes Gale momentarily furious when he sees it because he knows that Madge deserves so much more.

But then Gale will realise that Madge was a simple girl, and a large monument wouldn't have made her any happier. She fought for justice, and that is what Panem now has.

And as a lone, single tear joins the white rose atop the gravestone, Gale will realise that despite how little he knew about her, he knows that this is what she would have wanted.

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**Reviews are always nice :) And don't worry about criticism - I'm in year seven (seventh grade for you American lovelies), and I'm not expecting wonderful things for my first fanfic. I want to get better at this, so trust me I won't be offended. Be honest and I'll be happy :)**

**-Sophie **


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